


Volchitsa

by epistolic



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-21
Updated: 2013-07-21
Packaged: 2017-12-20 21:24:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/892033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had not been a marriage for love, but he loves her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Volchitsa

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [母狼](https://archiveofourown.org/works/942681) by [baysian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/baysian/pseuds/baysian)



> Written for the Pacific Rim Kinkmeme prompt: [Aleksis and Sasha were husband and wife who married young before they started training](http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/350.html?thread=292702). I'm not sure I addressed everything you wanted, OP, but hopefully it's a start. It's such a gorgeous prompt I had to give it a go ♥

“Hey.”

She’s standing over the hospital bed. She hasn’t been crying. Her hair is brushed back into its usual neat bun; she leans forward, takes his hand, doesn’t ask if he’s alright.

“Don’t do this again,” she tells him, firm.

He nods. 

“Alright,” he says. “Alright.”

\--

Promises don’t hold much weight in their business.

It’s lucky for him, then: she has never made him promise. Even when he’d asked her to marry him, back in the camps, with the raggedy mish-mash of refugees from the coastal cities trickling in by truckloads every morning, even then, it hadn’t been a promise. Her sister had just died of pneumonia. People were starving to death, although nobody official was acknowledging it. There were looters. Fights broke out, and sometimes fires. The ring he’d slipped onto her finger he had taken, without shame, from the hand of an unburied corpse.

She’d looked down at it for a moment, considering. It wasn’t gold – some other metal. A dull, brass sheen. Scratched and scraped. He’d polished most of the grime off with the end of his shirt.

She’d nodded at him curtly. “Good enough.”

It was a camp marriage. Love didn’t factor much into it. If you were alone in there, terrible things happened to you.

The intention had been: when we are out of here, we go our separate ways.

But, for some reason, that hadn’t happened.

\--

“Sit,” she commands. He sits. He knows better than to argue with her, especially at a time like this. She holds a bottle out to him. “Drink.”

He takes it. “How long was I out?”

“Three days. Complications with the anaesthetic. You’re missing a kidney.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well, I’ve got another.”

“We’re out of service for two months until you’re better.”

“I feel better already.” He holds the bottle up. Inspects it. “This isn’t the potato stuff. Where did you get this? It tastes like something you’d use to clean the drains.”

“Only the best for you, my dear. You know how I try.”

He watches her move around the room. He could pick her out of a crowd without seeing her face; that hidden energy to her, the power coiled deep down in her very bones. He knows she’s looking for her cigarettes. She has a secret cache tucked all over the place – under the mattress, in the cupboards, behind the old-fashioned kettle. 

He watches her straighten up, flick open a packet.

“You shouldn’t smoke in the same room as an invalid,” he says.

She sticks a cigarette in between his lips. “Oh, I’m sorry. Would the invalid like a light?”

“He would. And you should get some rest.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know you haven’t slept,” he says. He can see, all too clearly, the bruises underneath her eyes. They flare up in bright relief as she brings the lighter closer in to his face. “You look awful.”

She snorts. “Well, I didn’t marry you for your flattery, did I.”

To be honest, he doesn’t know why she married him at all. It’s a rule that they have, not to pry while they’re in the Drift; in many ways, she’s just as unknown to him as when they first met.

She hits him, smartly, upside the head.

“Stop thinking.” She steals his cigarette. “You were never much good at it, even with two kidneys.”

“That’s it,” he declares. “I’m going to bed.”

\--

That first time, her hair unwashed, dirt in thick black crescents under her nails.

She’d come to him and sat down on his pallet. Three months in and her clothes were hanging off her: the point of her shoulder as sharp and edged as a knife. Her eyes had seemed to him impossibly huge in the gaunt frame of her face.

“You, move over,” she’d said to him.

He’d moved. He’d watched her lie down beside him. 

And then, back to back for warmth, they’d slept.

\--

The next morning she’s in the shower when he wakes.

By the time she comes out, he’s already made coffee. She takes one look at him, slings her towel around her neck, snatches the kettle away. 

“Aleksis, sit down for Christ’s sake. You look pathetic.”

“You don’t have to be my nurse.”

She hikes a brow at him. Without her makeup she looks softer, younger, less of a killing machine.

“Who said anything about being your nurse?” she says, brusque. “Nobody’s going to be coddling you. It’s only that the last time you tried to make coffee you nearly burned the place down. And while it’s not much of a place, I do rather enjoy having somewhere to sleep.”

“Sasha, we need to talk.”

“Then talk,” she says.

He wraps his hands around his mug. She’s watching him now, her blue eyes pricking at his face; her expression is so impassive that he cannot read it.

“Is this what you wanted?” he manages at last.

Something in her relaxes slightly. “Aleksis, don’t be so damned morbid. You’re not dead yet.”

“I mean it. I can never be sure. We’ve never talked about it properly.”

“I thought it was one of our rules,” she says, “not to talk about it.”

Yes, he thinks. But neither of us have ever come this close before. He still remembers her mind when the Kaiju had ripped its way into his side of the conn-pod: a shrill neural scream that had almost knocked him out. Her face bent over him, just before he’d lost consciousness, had been as white as the face of a ghost.

“I’m going to steal some toast from the cafeteria,” she says. She stands, nudges her chair back in with her hip. Sets her mug down. “Would the invalid like some too?”

“I’m not very hungry.”

“You’re getting some,” she says, and goes out.

\--

She’d come back in the afternoon with a poster in her hand.

He’d watched her spread it on his pallet. Her hands, grubby from scrubbing laundry, had moved over the paper with a silent reverence. He’d bent over the poster, intrigued. Mouthed the words to himself.

_Are You Ready To Help Fight The War?_

He hadn’t thought much of it. His own mind ran along the predictable lines of food, water, shelter, wind, mud. There had been outbreaks of cholera in the Northern Sector. Two men had killed each other over matches just last night. There would be a hard time getting food, because a fallen tree in the storm of two days ago had blocked the main road and crucial supplies were not coming through.

He hadn’t thought that she was serious; but oh, she was.

\--

It had not been a marriage for love, but he loves her.

He knows this now. He has known it for several years. Her eyes like dagger-points, her neck, her wrists, the way she moves in armour. She knows the fastest way to make him furious; but she also knows when he is tired, when another minute in the Simulator will make him tear out the wires in frustration, when he’s injured, when he’s about to start a fight.

These days he cannot take his eyes off of her. He is always searching for her in crowded rooms. He misses the feel of her mind in his, misses her, misses her, even when she’s just an arm’s length away.

\--

“You deserve better,” he tells her one morning.

She freezes. All of her joints lock up. She’s in the middle of changing his bandages, so they are necessarily too close to one another, and she has his blood on her hands.

Distractedly she wipes her fingers off on the sheets. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You deserve better,” he says again. “Someone better than me. We both know.”

She glares at him. “Aleksis. Shut up.”

“It was my fault, what happened in that last mission. I lost my temper. I got impatient. I went out of sync for a moment. I know I broke the rules. I just – I can never keep my cool like you do, Sasha, not when we’re out there for hours at a time and the damn creature just won’t go down – ”

“Aleksis,” she says.

“One of these days I’ll get you killed,” he says.

“We’ve talked about this. One of our rules. No talk of dying.”

“Just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

“What use is there, talking about it?” she says. She ties a knot in the bandage; yanks on it, hard. “We both know it will happen one of these days. We knew it the moment they told us there was no escape pod. So, you might get me killed. I might get _you_ killed. I don’t see how that makes a difference.”

“Of course it makes a – ”

“It _doesn’t_.”

“I should never have asked you to marry me.”

She hits him. He doesn’t see it coming: it’s a solid blow to his jaw that knocks him flat on the bed.

For a moment he blinks up at the ceiling, stunned.

“You’re an absolute idiot,” she tells him, shortly. “Did it ever occur to you that I agreed to marry you, Aleksis Kaidonovsky? You didn’t steal me or force me into it. I said _yes_. I’m wearing your damned ring here on my finger. The next time you cheapen one of my decisions, including the one I made when I married you, I am going to drag you out of this room by your hair and I will remove your one remaining kidney personally. And then I will feed it to the dogs.” She scowls. “Now sit up. You’re bleeding through your other bandage.”

“But you don’t love me.”

“Like hell I don’t. Sit _up_.” She yanks roughly at his arm. “If you don’t sit up you can retie the damn thing yourself.”

He sits up. He watches her face as she works. He can taste his own blood in his mouth; his tongue brushes up against a loose tooth; he has never felt so lucky before in his life.

\--

She’d stepped out of the bathroom in her uniform. It was the first time he’d seen her with make-up on: mouth in scarlet, blue eyes lined with kohl. She’d bleached her hair and for the first few seconds he hadn’t recognised her.

She’d smiled at him. Bared just the tiniest slash of teeth. “How do I look?”

“Good,” he’d said. “You look good.”

The girl he’d found by her dead sister in the camps. No longer hungry, no longer cold, no longer splattered with mud, but still that creature with the starving eyes: lean and fierce and a fighter to the end.

“What?” she’d said, at last. “Why are you staring?”

“ _Volchitsa_ ,” he’d said, and then she’d laughed.

\--

She has never made him promise, but now he understands: that it is so, because she does not believe they need one. 

**Author's Note:**

> My Russian isn't great, but as far as I'm aware, _volchitsa_ = she-wolf. I do hope that's right. If not, well, I'll just... look a bit like an idiot /o\
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [Tumblr](http://epistolica.tumblr.com), [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com), or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


End file.
